Over five years in the building, Alberta's SuperNet project is now operational in 429 communities across the province.

A partnership of the provincial government, Bell Canada and Calgary-based Axia NetMedia Corp., the system brings high-speed Internet to places you wouldn't expect to find it, in hamlets such as Bruderheim and Driftpile.

Basically, it means that every Alberta community with a provincial government office, school, health facility or a library has access to high-speed Internet.

In a recent speech in Ottawa, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer praised the province for the ambitious project, noting that "more than 86 per cent of the population has access to SuperNet, making it a key factor in Alberta's social and economic development."

Photo courtesy of the Government of Alberta
Workers lay the high-speed SuperNet cable that gives 429 Alberta communities Internet access.

Ah, but there's a huge difference between building a beautiful new highway and actually filling it with cars and trucks. With a cost of $193 million to the provincial taxpayer, and technology marching on, there's always the risk of White Elephanthood.

What data is going to be moving on the SuperNet, and why wasn't the old slow Internet good enough? Are there things that city slickers can learn from how this technology is being used in smaller communities?

Ted Nibourg, a business management specialist at the Ag-Info Centre in the town of Stettler, has at least part of the answer. He says he needs the SuperNet to do his job properly in a world of tight budgets and rising energy costs.

"In 1994, the Alberta Agriculture department downsized and got rid of the district agriculture offices," he says. "What went by the wayside was some of the face-to-face extension that was going on. We tried to fill the gap from here with a call centre, and we do get calls from Manning to Manyberries."

But, he says, sometimes that's not good enough.

"Let's say one of the beef specialists wants to give a presentation on a new feed additive. He might want to talk to a group of producers in Vegreville at nine o'clock in the morning, and right now that involves driving three hours each way to make a one-hour presentation."

The Tandberg 9000 videoconferencing system that Nibourg plans to use on the SuperNet would allow the expert to present by two-way video from the office in Stettler. It even supports up to four simultaneous sites, so the expert could get a week's work done in a single morning.

Nibourg emphasizes the two-way nature of the communication, saying a farmer could "bring in a plant sample, or a bug" and get an online opinion from the expert. He says there are even security and cross-border trade implications, as was made clear at a recent meeting with U.S. agriculture officials held in Canmore.

"It looks like the (U.S. Department of Agriculture) will be doing a lot more of this kind of work for plant and livestock diseases, and they expect us to keep up," he says. "We hope to be able to do diagnostics, and hopefully we'll be able to talk to specialists around the world."

One community that definitely intends to capitalize on the SuperNet is Three Hills, a town of about 3,500 that's a 90-minute drive from either Calgary or Red Deer.

Mayor Kevin Edwards plans to use the SuperNet to give the town's library a new reason for being. "We are thinking next level, next wave," he says. "What we'd like to do is create a fully interactive knowledge centre. We'd like ordinary Albertans to be able to engage in the day-to-day exchange of practical knowledge, innovative thinking and best practices in a way that hasn't been possible before."

In a proposal to Alberta Economic Development, the folks in Three Hills observed that most of the proposed uses for the SuperNet were high-end applications in the fields of medicine and applied science.

But how, they asked, "will the Alberta SuperNet bring widespread advantage of a kind not previously available or otherwise possible to obtain, to regular Albertans, right away, that they can use every day?" They answered their own question by proposing a "virtual learning and business centre"(VLBC), kind of a street-level SuperNet. The 12-month project has already received funding of more than $50,000 from Alberta Community Development and has commitments from Alberta Economic Development, the Wild Rose Economic Development Corp. and Athabasca University.

In addition to having a tech-savvy and motivated mayor, the Three Hills Library Board is solidly behind the VLBC.

Most of the province's 300-plus small public libraries are facing a slow death from decreased budgets, shorter operating hours and fading relevance.

Alberta Community Development Minister Gary Mar likely stated the obvious when he said that "today's library is not your grandmother's library.”

The VLBC plan offers small libraries a chance to again become a buzzing hub of community activity.

Library board chair Susan Friesen, whose husband runs a plumbing company, gives a specific example from her business. "Take our guys who are apprentices," she says. "It's extremely brutal for them to take their training in Calgary or Red Deer. Often they're young couples and they have to pay two rents. If we could get the training offered for them by videoconferencing, it would be great."

Mayor Edwards agrees. Like every rural community, Three Hills is losing some of its best young people to the cities, he notes. "The hope is that, if you can retain your skilled workers in rural economy, then they will create opportunities and begin exporting to the urban centres - as opposed to the other way around."

Friesen echoes this sentiment, saying "we're so accustomed to going to the city to buy everything, but we're not country bumpkins out here, there are things we could be selling to the city."

When pressed for specifics on just what Three Hills has to sell online, everyone gets a little bit vague. So far, the town's most famous export is probably actress Erica Durance, who played Lois Lane in the TV series Smallville.

But with perky visionaries such as Edwards and Friesen at work, and an array of partners who really want to see the SuperNet doing something, the Three Hills experiment certainly bears watching.

Web Watch: www.albertasupernet.ca

(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)